"I think the first thing to know is, if you get attacked, have a relationship with your upstream providers," says Cameron Camp, a security researcher at IT security firm ESET North America.

While that might sound obvious to frontline IT defenders, he says, it's too often not obvious to senior managers, who need to encourage and help the organization's IT team cultivate the type of peer-to-peer relationships that will enable it to quickly mitigate related attacks, especially in this era of massive DDoS disruptions.